“Our Politically-Incorrect God”
Romans 1:18-32
September 21, 2008
Sometimes, it’s not a good thing to be politically-incorrect!
• More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!
• Wrapped and ready, Santa’s bringing you Chesterfields!
• Gee, Dad, you always get the best of everything…even Marlboro!
• DelMonte: You mean a woman can open it?
• Cooking? That’s what wives are for! I’m giving my wife a Kenwood Chef!
• Fat: the enemy that is shortening your life, BANISHED! How? With sanitized tapeworms! Easy to swallow!
Sometimes, it’s not a good thing to be politically-incorrect; at other times, though, it’s a good thing to buck the trend of political correctness. We serve a God Who isn’t particularly concerned that He pass some politically-correct litmus test, and yet there are people who sometimes seem to want to fit Him into their box; His character and nature aren’t up for vote. Yet here’s the son of one prominent evangelical leader: “Some might say I would be wise to swallow my misgivings about…stuff like God's sovereignty, wrath, hell, etc., remain orthodox, and thereby secure my place with God in eternity. But that is precisely my point: If those things are true, then God might as well send me to Hell…I have standards for my God, the first of which is this: I will not worship any God who is not at least as compassionate as I am.” Thanks for weighing in, son; I’m sure God’s taking careful notes to be sure He conforms to your image of what He ought to be…and today we look at the truth of Who God is—whether that’s Who we want or not.
Paul has just soared to the heights in his description of the gospel of Christ, the powerful gospel that accomplishes eternal salvation. It is a gospel, as we saw last week, that does not demand that we try to clean up our lives first, but that is accessible on the basis of faith to any/every person in the world. This sounds great! This sounds great! It’s so…positive! Uplifting! Encouraging! Thrilling! What’s next?
“For the wrath of God…” Oh…OK. And we read the second half of the chapter and we see a very ugly picture painted, full of sin and nastiness and stuff we don’t talk about in polite company! This is a theme that you’ll never hear in a decent percentage of American pulpits. The wrath of God? Let’s talk about becoming a better you! Let’s talk about 7 surefire tips to fix my marriage! Let’s talk about getting a handle on stress or finances or children or whatever…anything but the wrath of God! How antiquated! How outdated! How hellfire-and-brimstone, pound the pulpit, fundamentalist can you get?
Further, we don’t just get a mention of the wrath of God, and of man’s sinfulness, for a paragraph or two; it goes on this way for the next two chapters, before we get back to the subject of God’s saving of men and women from damnation. What’s up with this? Why does Paul go from the incredible “positive” message, if you will, of God’s powerful gospel of grace, to a discussion of God’s fierce wrath? Here’s the answer: we can’t get to the good news of the gospel until we see the bad news of our sin, and the just/righteous wrath of a holy God directed against that sin!
I. The Fact of God’s Wrath - :18
“It is necessary for God to reveal His righteousness in the gospel because God has also found it necessary to reveal His wrath against sin” (Moo). This is the connection between verses 17 and 18. And the word “wrath” is the correct word; some translations use the word “anger”, but we tend to think of anger in terms of an emotion, which can be capricious. So what do we mean when we speak of God’s wrath?
A. Definition
We get messed up at this point, if we’re not careful, by likening God’s wrath to our anger. We fly off the handle; God never does. We get angry at the wrong things; God never does. We fail to get angry at things we ought; God never makes that mistake. Our anger comes and goes, intensifies and then subsides; God’s wrath is consistent at all times. Some people liken the wrath of God to the capricious anger of Roman deities, who were seen to fly into a rage at the slightest provocation sometimes. No…it is His consistent opposition to sin: period. Wrath is the necessary reaction of a holy God to the sin of man. If God did not react with wrath, He would not be holy; He would not be God.
B. Direction
“Against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men”, the Scripture says; God perfectly hates the sin (while loving the sinner, by the way!). As I said earlier, the wrath of God doesn’t find much of a place in today’s American pulpits. Consequently, researcher Christian Smith writes, in his book entitled Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, that America’s professing Christian young people have developed an image of God that is far from Biblical.
“…the de facto dominant religion among contemporary teenagers in the United States is what we might call “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”. The creed of this religion, as codified from what emerged from our interviews with U.S. teenagers, sounds something like this:
1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
That image of God is categorically not the picture of God that emerges from the pages of the Bible! Despite what you’ll hear from some pulpits, God is not a celestial life-coach cheering you on to reach greater heights in self-fulfillment, a “you-can-do-it” positive thinker to the max who is there to pull you through. Paul says that the wrath of God is being revealed (present tense) against man’s wickedness. Why?
II. The Basis for God’s Wrath - :19-26 – “they exchanged…”
Man is engaged in a full-scale battle to suppress what he knows to be true about God. We can know that a God exists, know something of His creative nature and His awesome power, by looking at creation, at the world and the universe in which we exist. “The heavens declare the glory of God”, Scripture says, and yet many would believe that what we see exists as the result of blind chance and random factors operating in a universe adrift in the cosmos without direction or purpose. That’s not how Johannes Kepler saw things, the founder of the science of modern astronomy. Kepler wrote that “the undevout astronomer is mad.” Why? Because man can look at the created order and see that there must be an intelligence behind it all, and he could look at the complexity of the cosmos and know there was a Designer. Yet noted atheist Sam Harris writes that there is no evidence for the existence of God, and does so, presumably, with a straight face. That’s not the conclusion that Antony Flew reached, though. Flew traveled for decades debating Christians, one of the most notable atheists in the world; today, though he has not come to faith in Christ, as an 80-something year-old man, Flew has reached the conclusion that there has to be a God to explain all that we see in the world—and he came to this conclusion, despite his reluctance, despite his decades-long reputation—on the basis of the evidence for God that he could not explain away. In honesty, he has only come so far to what we would call “deism”, and deism is not Christian, but it is a belief in a supernatural deity Whose existence best explains our existence. Antony Flew could not persist as a man of integrity and deny God’s existence in the face of the evidence!
Now, this revelation of God is what we call “natural revelation”, and it is incomplete. While we say that anyone can look at creation and come to the realization that there must be some great Designer of it all, that truth isn’t enough to lead a person to salvation in Christ. But this is not Paul’s concern in today’s passage; he merely makes it clear that all ought know deep down that there must be a God of some kind, and that it is only by suppressing this knowledge that men can deny God’s existence. Can natural revelation be a help to us in knowing God? In some ways, it can, as a first step, if you will; the idea that there must be a God will lead some to search for Him, as Paul echoes in Acts 17. But the basic problem remains: God’s wrath is against us because of what we have done, and His natural revelation leaves man without excuse.
Three times we read, “they exchanged…” In each case, people put themselves, their own idols, their own ideas, their own self-whatever in place of God. God, in each case, responds to their decisions by “handing them over” to some consequence of their own sin. He consigns people to experience the full consequence of sinfulness. Note: some of the consequences of sin may seem pleasurable for a season! We shouldn’t get the idea that immediate hurt and loss attends God’s wrath. And note that there is an acceleration of sin’s consequences at work here.
A. Exchange 1: The glory of God for idols
• God made the truth plain
• Man doesn’t want the truth
• Man does this proclaiming that he’s being smart in so doing
• Man ends up playing the fool
An idol is simply a substitute god, and there are many and they are varied. Trading the glory of God for self-made images is something mankind has been doing for thousands of years; the psalmist talked about this in Psalm 106, when he wrote that Israel had exchanged the Glory of God “for an image of a bull, which eats grass”. This references their fashioning of the golden calf to worship during the exodus from Egypt. We don’t generally worship these kinds of images today; rather, we lift up less concrete—but every bit as real—things as idols. Politics has become an idol these days to many, particularly to those, it seems, lacking a belief in any real God. Material things serve the same purpose for others, as do hobbies, relationships, money, sex, even spirituality…people are adept at crafting idols of their own making, to their own liking, for their own use. But the first commandment is still valid: “you shall have no other gods before Me!” Next,
B. Exchange 2: The truth of God for lies
Charging young Timothy with the critical, central nature of proclaiming the truth of God’s Word, Paul warns that “the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (II Timothy 4:3-4). We’d rather hear “sweet little lies” than to hear the truth, and this is what Paul says is true of man: we’ve managed to exchange God’s truth for lies that we like to tell ourselves. But there’s a third exchange that man makes:
C. Exchange 3: The design of God for deviance
We get accused, as Christians, of being against a lot of things, and sometimes against certain groups, notably homosexuals. Let me set the record straight on a few things:
• God designed sexuality as a key component of what it means to be human. He designed it not only for procreation, but for joy and fulfillment and fun! God created it and pronounced it good, and God is pleased when sex is celebrated as God intended. The first word re sex isn’t “don’t”; it’s God’s design!
• God designed it to be vitally linked with committed love between a man and a woman. That’s the context in which sex is appropriate and encouraged. Let me go on record as being in favor—strongly in favor!—of healthy sexuality in the context of the marriage relationship.
• Anything that deviates from that norm that God established constitutes a falling short of God’s standard; anything. Homosexual sex is displeasing to God…just like extramarital sex is displeasing to God…just like premarital sex is displeasing to God, and the reason is that God, the Creator of sexuality, designed sex for our fulfillment and our good, and blesses it when we engage in it according to His design. To single out homosexuality is wrong; to accept it and other forms of sexual sin is to use God’s great gift in a way God didn’t intend, and is just as wrong.
A word about homosexuality: as we’ll see below, there is a final step that Paul mentions to this process of sin, and that is the justifying of sinful behavior. We’ve seen this in our society over the last couple of generations; in the 60’s free-love society, we began to soften our stance toward premarital sex. We’ve softened our stance against the sin of divorce. Now, we’ve softened our stance against homosexuality as well. There are churches, as we well know, that have pronounced homosexuality a moral good in at least some circumstances, and have been willing to go along with the redefinition of even marriage itself to include so-called “same-sex marriage”. And there has been no dearth of dubious Bible “scholars” who have tried to find Biblical justification for this in ways that stretch the imagination and are unfaithful to the Biblical text. This is to err on the one side, and it’s a grievous error. But can we talk about the error on the other side of the coin? I’ve heard professing Christians, even preachers, respond to homosexuals by calling them names. This isn’t the spirit of Christ!
“Due penalty” – here is a phrase that has given countless preachers license to rant about the AIDS virus, about particular diseases that tend to afflict homosexuals, etc. The fact is that AIDS is one, but only one, very visible and particularly deadly evidence of the rebellion of all of us against the holy standards of God’s will for living, and there are many, many more! AIDS is evidence of God’s disapproval of our sin—as is cancer, and arthritis, and Alzheimer’s, and heart disease, and…
Three “exchanges”:
• The glory of God for idols
• The truth of God for lies
• The design of God for deviance
Now, note how God responds:
III. The Execution of God’s Wrath - :24-32 – “God gave them up…”
This is present-tense judgment in this passage, not some future-tense sense of what will happen in eternity. Yes, God will reveal His wrath fully one day in final judgment, but that’s not what’s in view here. Rather, Paul tells us here, three times, that “God gave them over”; this is the judgment of God seen in God’s abandonment of sinners to the consequences of their own willful self-centeredness. This came home clearly to me many years ago in speaking with a co-worker named Greg. Greg lived the high life, a promiscuous life of sexual license. We’d gotten to know each other well enough for him to know where I stood, and one night, in a moment of honesty, Greg, this guy who “had it all” according to what the world said a virile young man ought, said to me, “Byron, sometimes I wish sex had never been invented.” Sexual freedom had promised Greg much, but had filled him with regret! What is this, but evidence of God giving over a person to the consequences of his own sin? Three ways Paul says God has done this:
A. Regarding the will – what we do - :24-25
We won’t belabor any of these three points, except to note that they involve the totality of our being: will, emotions, and intellect. God abandoned man to do things that will prove man’s undoing. Second,
B. Regarding the emotions – what we feel - :26-27
God abandoned man to emotional misplacement, to emotional confusion, to emotional attachment to the wrong things and “unattachment” to the right things. Third,
C. Regarding the intellect – how we think - :28-32
Our minds don’t think right; this is also the consequence of not only our sinful choices, but God’s present-tense abandonment of us to our sin. And minds that don’t think right prove fertile ground for all manner of sinful activity. Lest anyone think that Paul was only referencing “major sins”, and so he adds a list that includes what we might call more “mundane” sins. Gossip rising to this level? Others? Read the list! You’d think that Paul had picked up a copy of TV Guide, or turned on MTV, or gone to Blockbuster Video in compiling this list!
And then he finishes by suggesting that beyond committing sin, man experiences the unfolding wrath of God by condoning sin, minimizing sin, justifying sin, lying to God and ourselves about the sinfulness of sin. And finally, man cheers on sin. Verse 32 says, “Though they know God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” This is the behavior that merits the wrath of a holy God!
The wrath of God is not a politically-correct subject to talk about, and yet our God isn’t too terribly concerned with political correctness. The wrath of God isn’t a particularly warm and fuzzy subject either, and if we’re not careful, we’ll leave today’s message feeling overwhelmed, even hopeless. Do not despair: what we’re talking about today, and over the course of the next few weeks, will lead us to the amazing grace of God, that while we are sinners through and through and under the wrath of God, He has provided a way for us to live free.
Table Talk
If God were not a God of righteous wrath, what difference would that make? How would it change our understanding of
• His character?
• Our sin?
• Grace?
